D’Amelio Terras invites curator Kate McNamara to present Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, a group exhibition of artists working in abstraction.

While the paintings of the exhibition are seemingly disparate in structure, each exemplify common attributes made visible through the artist’s engagement with process and practice; each painting foregrounds technique and pushes the medium through an active investigation and dissection of abstraction. Many of the paintings were conceived through action-oriented methods, made visible through paint stains, the presence of handiwork, or the orientation of brushwork. These paintings collaboratively solicit and invite an investigation of painting, abstraction, process, and practice. The proposed exhibition provides a charged space where these relevant discourses can be considered, without being imposed, and petitions the viewer to deliberate on her or his own assumptions about painting as a material, a vocabulary, a genre, a pluralistic history, and critical tool. The word “affinities” is used in the context of this exhibition to express and secure the multiplicity of relationships imposed, maintained, insinuated, and assumed throughout the show. “Affinities” suggests certain associations and similarities in defining the paintings and the artists of the exhibition, as well as captures a working definition for the word abstraction. “Affinities” also relates to paint as a substance that is relied upon for its use in combination with other material; it has the capability of facilitating relationships between color, texture, structure, and design. “Affinities” also points to interpersonal dialogues and independent relationships the artists have with one another.

Kate McNamara is Director and Chief Curator at the Boston University Art Gallery. She is also a co-founder of Cleopatra's, a Brooklyn-based project space. She received her M.A. at The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a B.A. with a Curatorial Concentration from Hampshire College, MA. Kate has held curatorial positions at MoMA PS1, New York; AIR Antwerpen, Belgium; and Participant, INC., New York.

D’Amelio Terras invites curator Kate McNamara to present Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, a group exhibition of artists working in abstraction.

While the paintings of the exhibition are seemingly disparate in structure, each exemplify common attributes made visible through the artist’s engagement with process and practice; each painting foregrounds technique and pushes the medium through an active investigation and dissection of abstraction. Many of the paintings were conceived through action-oriented methods, made visible through paint stains, the presence of handiwork, or the orientation of brushwork. These paintings collaboratively solicit and invite an investigation of painting, abstraction, process, and practice. The proposed exhibition provides a charged space where these relevant discourses can be considered, without being imposed, and petitions the viewer to deliberate on her or his own assumptions about painting as a material, a vocabulary, a genre, a pluralistic history, and critical tool. The word “affinities” is used in the context of this exhibition to express and secure the multiplicity of relationships imposed, maintained, insinuated, and assumed throughout the show. “Affinities” suggests certain associations and similarities in defining the paintings and the artists of the exhibition, as well as captures a working definition for the word abstraction. “Affinities” also relates to paint as a substance that is relied upon for its use in combination with other material; it has the capability of facilitating relationships between color, texture, structure, and design. “Affinities” also points to interpersonal dialogues and independent relationships the artists have with one another.

Kate McNamara is Director and Chief Curator at the Boston University Art Gallery. She is also a co-founder of Cleopatra's, a Brooklyn-based project space. She received her M.A. at The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a B.A. with a Curatorial Concentration from Hampshire College, MA. Kate has held curatorial positions at MoMA PS1, New York; AIR Antwerpen, Belgium; and Participant, INC., New York.(less)

4 4 3 P A S is pleased to announce Against Nature, an exhibition of large paintings by Laurel Sparks. Combining the ornate flatness of fin-de-siècle modernism with the gestural wildness of early Abstract Expressionism, Sparks uses theatrical iconography inspired by queer and psychedelic cinema, inventing an aesthetic lexicon akin to high femme drag.

Androgynous iconoclasts, from Luisa Casati to Ziggy Stardust, act as muses in Sparks’ abstract portraits of glamor and decay. Alluding to these glamorous figures, Sparks overlays linear silhouettes of Venetian chandeliers and perverse Christmas trees with an ambidextrous blind contour drawing. Icons take shape and dissolve within a carnival of color, glitter, and bejeweled protrusions.

Intense gestures celebrate baroque forms of artifice: theatricality, costume, cosmetics, and persona. At the same time, raw emptiness contradicts hedonistic adornment. Within each work there is a painterly call and response between poured white marble dust, bare canvas and decorative pattern. The surfaces oscillate between elegance and vulgarity. Pleasure, elegy, and irreverence co-exist in Sparks’ paintings, like the complex character of the muses they invoke.

Sparks holds an MFA from Bard and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work was recently exhibited in the DeCordova Biennial (Lincoln, MA) and Dramatis Personae at Dodge Gallery (New York, NY). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.